I finally updated the site’s stale website design, if you didn’t notice. I’m hoping this redesign will lead me into the next era of writing here, but things are still getting updated.
It has been months in the making, with lots of starts, stops, and mistakes. I’m not good at web design, and while the WordPress themes are adequate, I struggled to get what I wanted.
Here’s my what has happened and what brought about the change.
A Little Help From My Scammer
As I’ve mentioned before, in the summer of 2025, I got caught up in a scam. At the time, I had a feeling that something wasn’t right with my new mentor, but he did offer up advice about things I was struggling with. Luckily, I never gave him any money.
One of the best pieces of advice that he offered was to redesign my website.
When I last picked a theme and set up my site, I had simply tried to copy sites I visited, like sixcolors.com and Daring Fireball. I wanted to keep it simple and just have my blog posts come up.
With his suggestion, I wanted to make the site more modern and to highlight my three major topics: Fiction, Technology, and Family.
He instructed me on setting up a staging area to work on my new design. Once I got it all done, I set out to redesign everything, but things had changed a little bit since I last did any design work. I had to learn how to get around the block editor in a new way. I’m pretty sure that last time I worked on the theme, the block editor wasn’t even around.
I put in some work on the site when I could, but I focused more on writing. I felt like a design wouldn’t help me much if I didn’t have content to go with it. When I had a few spare moments, I would try to peek at the website design and tweak things, but I never truly liked what I built.
After a while, I ran out of spare time. The website languished. I became aware of the scam and felt that all the information he gave me probably came from an AI.
The New Website Design Kept Nagging At Me
After a few months of working only on writing, I felt a little pull in my mind to keep working on the design. I had created a new logo and everything, so I should try to get it out there. I still felt like I could redesign it all by October, but things got busy.
Someone on Threads again suggested I redesign the website (it was solicited information), so I tried to find more time to do so, but I still struggled to get what I wanted out of it.
I think my greatest difficulty was fear and ignorance. I still don’t really know how to maximize the block editor, but I’ve been messing around with it, and I’m learning more.
My redesign deadline came and went, but I still wanted to get this thing out. I figured I would try to get it out in the new year and set a new deadline. As that deadline approached, my family came down with the flu. I lost a week of work time as I tended to them.
I pushed the date back again, but then we ended up fostering a couple of adorable puppies, which again took all my free time.
Ready Or Not
I got tired of constantly pushing back the date and rollout. I wasn’t done with everything I wanted to do, but I thought it might be better to just roll it out and edit the thing than to keep dragging my feet.
On a day when I didn’t get much of anything done because of the kids and dogs, I sat down and just pushed the launch button on my test site. The site wasn’t perfect, but it was new and fresh. My new logo has been out there on my images, but I wanted to make it more prominent.
The test site was copied over to the main site, and that’s when I realized that everything I had done on the test site had been deleted. I made that instance back in June of 2025 and have been creating at least a blog post a week since then. They were all wiped out in a minute.
Not good.
I scrambled to find a backup, which I thankfully had, but everything on the design front looked awful. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to work on the site as I had to go pick up the kids from school.
The next day, I kennelled the dogs, remade a test site, and tweaked the design as best I could to make it work for now.
The New Redesign
So, the site hopefully feels a little more modern and new. I want to maintain or increase the speed and also get rid of some of the plugins to help with that.
I haven’t even finished working on all the navigation and pages I want to, but I do feel like it is more streamlined. You can get the latest posts from the top, my latest technology posts below, and my fiction below that. I will probably tweak the flow of things as I go. I’m also thinking of adding a sidebar with some quick options.
But the site has been relaunched with a new logo and flow. What do you think? Let me know in the comments or on Threads.
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